Lots of boats seem to shut off their tracking systems.

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Wildlife management has been revolutionized by the ability to track species in their natural habitats—to figure out what areas they actually occupy, where they feed, and so on. For years, that ability was limited to large mammals, which could easily handle the bulky batteries and electronics required to frequently broadcast location information. The miniaturization of electronics, however, has opened up the list of species we can track, adding birds and fish to it, and revealing the huge ranges covered by some species.

But now, some researchers have decided to turn the tables by placing hardware on birds to keep track of us. More specifically, our fishing fleets, which often operate in remote areas that are difficult to track. The work showed that albatross species could easily carry miniature detectors that would pick up radar and identification signals from any fishing boats they get within range of. This strategy is made even more effective by the fact that albatrosses are drawn to fishing boats.

Snooping on fishing boats

The Pacific is immense, but it's dotted with islands. Some of these create exclusive economic zones where one country has access to the fish stocks; there are also some large oceanic preserves. Outside these areas, any nation is able to fish, although some at-risk species may be covered by international treaties.

Those are the rules; monitoring whether they're being obeyed is an enormous challenge, given the vast area that needs to be covered by enforcement. Complicating matters further, some of the nations in charge of the remote territories are quite distant; France, for example, has a number of islands in the remote South Pacific.

Fishing boats can use something called a Vessel Monitoring System to declare their presence, allowing them to be identified remotely. This system is often switched on only when the vessel is in exclusive waters. Most boats also carry a broadcast system called an Automatic Identification System that can be used to help avoid collisions. But these can also be switched off. Finally, most ships use radar to avoid collisions with any vessels that aren't using one of these systems.

While patrol boats in the area could use these to identify fishing vessels, vessels fishing illegally are likely to turn the broadcast systems off. And anyone who's outside of the area is out of luck. Almost none of the data is available in real time, and obtaining even delayed data is difficult. And again, vessels can simply shut these systems down, leaving them impossible to detect without on-the-site radar monitoring.

The research team here decided to do some on-the-site monitoring without splurging on a boat. To do so, the researchers decided to leverage something that was going to be heading to fishing grounds anyway: seabirds. Building on the advances in wildlife trackers, they built a device that included a GPS receiver, an antenna that can pick up radar signals, and an antenna for a satellite communications system devoted to environmental monitoring. Throw in a lithium battery and a small solar panel, and the 65 gram package can scan for radar every five minutes and send in real-time alerts whenever any vessel is present.

Who’s out there?

To get this on site, the authors went to albatross nesting grounds in the South Pacific islands Crozet, Kerguelen, and Amsterdam. The researchers chose nesting albatrosses because the males and females take turns providing time on nest and making extensive feeding trips. That way, they could attach the trackers to a nesting bird and be sure that it would take an extensive trip across the Pacific in the not-too-distant future, then return the hardware to the original location when the test was over. Overall, 169 birds gave the system a lift through the Pacific, covering everywhere from the east coast of Africa to New Zealand.

Overall, the system checked in with over 600,000 GPS locations and picked up over 5,000 radar detections. Putting those together with data obtained later, the researchers were able to determine that these corresponded to 353 different boats.

Overall, nearly 30 percent of the radar signals didn't have corresponding Automatic Identification System data, indicating that it had been shut off at the time the boat was detected. That number was reduced within a French exclusive economic zone, in the area, and mostly represented French fishing vessels. At the edge of this zone, however, the researchers detected Chinese and Spanish vessels that would switch their broadcast systems on and off.

In international waters, the number without active Automatic Identification Systems rose even higher. While some of those are undoubtedly not fishing vessels, the authors found this occurred most frequently in areas that are fished for tuna.

The data also confirmed that albatrosses will approach fishing vessels they sight, although the numbers are relatively small: only about 6 percent of the birds did this. The behavior was much more common in mature birds and seemed to vary among species.

Overall, the work represents an ingenious way of having animals assist us in protecting them. Albatross populations have been reduced due to their tendency to go after the bait used in long line fishing. It's possible that the birds themselves can help us understand the prevalence of this fishing and perhaps even identify boats that are doing it illegally.

Yeah, everyone knows, during the 1500s with the rapid expansion of Caribbean colonies on the Spanish Main and rise of piracy and privateers attacking treasure ships, the Spaniards quickly found themselves running low on iron to make shackles for prisoners. What they had in abundance were albatrosses. By tying a living albatross around a prisoner's neck, the sailors could quickly be alerted should one of the ruffians start stirring in the brig as the creature woke and caw cawed the song of it's people, and come rushing to restrain them.

Yeah, everyone knows, during the 1500s with the rapid expansion of Caribbean colonies on the Spanish Main and rise of piracy and privateers attacking treasure ships, the Spaniards quickly found themselves running low on iron to make shackles for prisoners. What they had in abundance were albatrosses. By tying a living albatross around a prisoner's neck, the sailors could quickly be alerted should one of the ruffians start stirring in the brig as the creature woke and caw cawed the song of it's people, and come rushing to restrain them.

You're just pushing our buttons, aren't you?

But back to the original comment, that's the first thing I wondered while reading it; how long until the people on the fishing vessels begin targeting the birds?

Clever methodology, but it would seem more functional to corelate satellite data with transponder output. Even if they 'go dark' they're still traveling through open sea.

You have this thing called "weather" and "night" that tend to fuck up visual satellites. Plus, these satellites aren't geosync, so they're not going to be overhead all the time and you have to jump from satellite to satellite.

It does raise the notion that in the future once mesh networking is up and running, whether one can track boats with disabled transponders based on pings from the mesh satellites going overhead and track them that way. It'd be a lot more data to crunch for a location, bearing and speed, but we have neural networks that can probably do that without breaking a sweat once they're trained.

Clever methodology, but it would seem more functional to corelate satellite data with transponder output. Even if they 'go dark' they're still traveling through open sea.

You have this thing called "weather" and "night" that tend to fuck up visual satellites. Plus, these satellites aren't geosync, so they're not going to be overhead all the time and you have to jump from satellite to satellite.

It does raise the notion that in the future once mesh networking is up and running, whether one can track boats with disabled transponders based on pings from the mesh satellites going overhead and track them that way. It'd be a lot more data to crunch for a location, bearing and speed, but we have neural networks that can probably do that without breaking a sweat once they're trained.

There are satellites up there that find things with more than cameras.

Most boat-finder radars are going to be using a SAR and looking for the wake, which is a much easier problem that visual identification (getting enough pixels on a small boat is hard; the wake is much larger). The SAR wavelength is typically long enough to punch through clouds without much issue.

several people got to this first, but I wanted to point out that publishing this just about guarantees that some fishermen will start shooting the birds, so ARS just did the albatross a big disservice. good job.

With tens of thousands of birds and no way to actually see the transponders (they're on the BACK of the birds, so looking up from below you can't tell if it has one or not), you'd have to be packing a hell of a lot of ammo to account for hte number of birds that need to be shot to "get 'em all", not to mention the order of magnitude more amount that you'd need to account for MISSING THEM.

I think if you're carrying a few hundred thousand rounds of shotgun shells on a fishing boat, someone would notice that and bring it to someone else's attention.

Jesus... "They'll shoot the birds"... As if they fucking have time to do that, let alone the aim and resources. THINK people... It's not that hard to do.

several people got to this first, but I wanted to point out that publishing this just about guarantees that some fishermen will start shooting the birds, so ARS just did the albatross a big disservice. good job.

On the other hand, including this information in the article:

Quote:

Building on the advances in wildlife trackers, they built a device that included a GPS receiver, an antenna that can pick up radar signals, and an antenna for a satellite communications system devoted to environmental monitoring. Throw in a lithium battery and a small solar panel, and the 65 gram package can scan for radar every five minutes and send in real-time alerts whenever any vessel is present.

might increase the chance that those fishermen who read more than just headlines will understand that the data has already been sent and shooting the birds will only raise more suspicion.

Building on the advances in wildlife trackers, they built a device that included a GPS receiver, an antenna that can pick up radar signals, and an antenna for a satellite communications system devoted to environmental monitoring. Throw in a lithium battery and a small solar panel, and the 65 gram package can scan for radar every five minutes and send in real-time alerts whenever any vessel is present.

This sounds like one of those cold-war era crazy ideas that was tried out.

several people got to this first, but I wanted to point out that publishing this just about guarantees that some fishermen will start shooting the birds, so ARS just did the albatross a big disservice. good job.

With tens of thousands of birds and no way to actually see the transponders (they're on the BACK of the birds, so looking up from below you can't tell if it has one or not), you'd have to be packing a hell of a lot of ammo to account for hte number of birds that need to be shot to "get 'em all", not to mention the order of magnitude more amount that you'd need to account for MISSING THEM.

I think if you're carrying a few hundred thousand rounds of shotgun shells on a fishing boat, someone would notice that and bring it to someone else's attention.

Jesus... "They'll shoot the birds"... As if they fucking have time to do that, let alone the aim and resources. THINK people... It's not that hard to do.

People shoot sealions and sea otters because "they take my fish". It's amazing what people will do if they think something is threatening their livelihood.

several people got to this first, but I wanted to point out that publishing this just about guarantees that some fishermen will start shooting the birds, so ARS just did the albatross a big disservice. good job.

With tens of thousands of birds and no way to actually see the transponders (they're on the BACK of the birds, so looking up from below you can't tell if it has one or not), you'd have to be packing a hell of a lot of ammo to account for hte number of birds that need to be shot to "get 'em all", not to mention the order of magnitude more amount that you'd need to account for MISSING THEM.

I think if you're carrying a few hundred thousand rounds of shotgun shells on a fishing boat, someone would notice that and bring it to someone else's attention.

Jesus... "They'll shoot the birds"... As if they fucking have time to do that, let alone the aim and resources. THINK people... It's not that hard to do.

People shoot sealions and sea otters because "they take my fish". It's amazing what people will do if they think something is threatening their livelihood.

There's a world of difference between trying to shoot a bird flying above you and shooting a sea lion lazily floating in the sea. Try shooting something from the deck of a bobbing ship sometime. Tell me how accurate you are. (I'll give ya a hint: not damned very!) Add on top of that that if the birds perch it's on the vessel itself, and there's little chance they're going to bother. Sea lions, OTOH, will literally crawl right on just about any platform but more often than not, they're simply baited with bycatch then shot while they come right up to the side of the vessel.

How would I know all this? I grew up in a small fishing town. There were three major job sources. Commercial fishing, logging, and servicing one of the two.

Clever methodology, but it would seem more functional to corelate satellite data with transponder output. Even if they 'go dark' they're still traveling through open sea.

You have this thing called "weather" and "night" that tend to fuck up visual satellites. Plus, these satellites aren't geosync, so they're not going to be overhead all the time and you have to jump from satellite to satellite.

It does raise the notion that in the future once mesh networking is up and running, whether one can track boats with disabled transponders based on pings from the mesh satellites going overhead and track them that way. It'd be a lot more data to crunch for a location, bearing and speed, but we have neural networks that can probably do that without breaking a sweat once they're trained.

There are satellites up there that find things with more than cameras.

Most boat-finder radars are going to be using a SAR and looking for the wake, which is a much easier problem that visual identification (getting enough pixels on a small boat is hard; the wake is much larger). The SAR wavelength is typically long enough to punch through clouds without much issue.

Isn't that exactly how the USSR tracked US nuclear submarines? The wake of the sub was very large indeed, the wavelength of the radar very long.

several people got to this first, but I wanted to point out that publishing this just about guarantees that some fishermen will start shooting the birds, so ARS just did the albatross a big disservice. good job.

With tens of thousands of birds and no way to actually see the transponders (they're on the BACK of the birds, so looking up from below you can't tell if it has one or not), you'd have to be packing a hell of a lot of ammo to account for hte number of birds that need to be shot to "get 'em all", not to mention the order of magnitude more amount that you'd need to account for MISSING THEM.

I think if you're carrying a few hundred thousand rounds of shotgun shells on a fishing boat, someone would notice that and bring it to someone else's attention.

Jesus... "They'll shoot the birds"... As if they fucking have time to do that, let alone the aim and resources. THINK people... It's not that hard to do.

People shoot sealions and sea otters because "they take my fish". It's amazing what people will do if they think something is threatening their livelihood.

There's a world of difference between trying to shoot a bird flying above you and shooting a sea lion lazily floating in the sea. Try shooting something from the deck of a bobbing ship sometime. Tell me how accurate you are. (I'll give ya a hint: not damned very!) Add on top of that that if the birds perch it's on the vessel itself, and there's little chance they're going to bother. Sea lions, OTOH, will literally crawl right on just about any platform but more often than not, they're simply baited with bycatch then shot while they come right up to the side of the vessel.

How would I know all this? I grew up in a small fishing town. There were three major job sources. Commercial fishing, logging, and servicing one of the two.

They're using albatrosses, who can fly ten thousand miles without landing, and when they do land need a running start to get enough lift to take off again. They aren't really "perching" birds.

People shooting the birds is the first thing I thought of, too, but I also don't think it's a big risk.

Seems like the same lack of resources that makes detection difficult will also make intercepting hard? And once an illegal fisher is caught, what then? It's there enough international cooperation to actually do enforcement via fines or jailtime? Is one nation impounding another nations vessel practical, or will that be viewed as extremely antagonistic?

I'm not trying to make things seem dire, I don't know the answers to any of those questions. I kinda expect that it's all hard, and there's no will to do anything, but I really don't know.

Sure enough, this story is already on Reddit’s “Birds Aren’t Real” community.

That seems like the kind of thing that may start out as a joke, but these days is apt to snowball in the steeply-sloped, sticky snow of Internet-connected human stupidity into a massive, tumbling snow-Death Star.

several people got to this first, but I wanted to point out that publishing this just about guarantees that some fishermen will start shooting the birds, so ARS just did the albatross a big disservice. good job.

With tens of thousands of birds and no way to actually see the transponders (they're on the BACK of the birds, so looking up from below you can't tell if it has one or not), you'd have to be packing a hell of a lot of ammo to account for hte number of birds that need to be shot to "get 'em all", not to mention the order of magnitude more amount that you'd need to account for MISSING THEM.

I think if you're carrying a few hundred thousand rounds of shotgun shells on a fishing boat, someone would notice that and bring it to someone else's attention.

Jesus... "They'll shoot the birds"... As if they fucking have time to do that, let alone the aim and resources. THINK people... It's not that hard to do.

People shoot sealions and sea otters because "they take my fish". It's amazing what people will do if they think something is threatening their livelihood.

There's a world of difference between trying to shoot a bird flying above you and shooting a sea lion lazily floating in the sea. Try shooting something from the deck of a bobbing ship sometime. Tell me how accurate you are. (I'll give ya a hint: not damned very!) Add on top of that that if the birds perch it's on the vessel itself, and there's little chance they're going to bother. Sea lions, OTOH, will literally crawl right on just about any platform but more often than not, they're simply baited with bycatch then shot while they come right up to the side of the vessel.

How would I know all this? I grew up in a small fishing town. There were three major job sources. Commercial fishing, logging, and servicing one of the two.

While we're on anecdotes: my father-in-law used to add meat to his family's boat-meals by shooting seagulls with a ten-gauge.

Add to it that this would be done from rather large vessels that are far more stable than a 32-foot catalina, and I can absolutely believe that it is possible to shoot birds from a boat.

Like others have said, it's not that it's a guarantee, but albatrosses aren't exactly quickly reproducing, which means any additional deaths will be felt.